Post Vacation Thoughts

I’m back from vacation now. Actually it has been about a week now. What have I been doing since then? Well nothing terribly exciting I’m afraid, just fixing some stuff, talking to programmers and trying to get my big projects in order. But even though I haven’t been working doesn’t mean that I’ve stopped thinking about work. Well it’s debatable when I’m thinking about work and when I’m thinking about play but that’s one of the perks at working at Project: Hazel.

What I have been thinking about mainly is large faction fights. Of course that got me to thinking about my own mortality or more my in-game mortality. You see; in faction fights items are lost and although losing a shiny sword is no big deal to some and you accept it as a part of Squidwolf Minecraft – especially part of faction fights – it is a bit frustrating that not only did you lose your bling but it goes down before you can say pwnd (pwnd is a pretty tough word to pronounce though). What is the problem here? Some say its focus firing and I would have to agree.

What you have to understand about focus firing is that it’s really effective. As soon as an opponent is removed from the battlefield, the items in that person’s inventory stops being useful for the opponent whether that’s doing damage, defence or logistic (however unlikely).

Now probably some of you are thinking, “Sure we can just give people really high armour hitpoints and incapacitate them when they go 50% into armor”. It might work but I don’t think it would. Part of war is to inflict financial losses on your enemy and nothing does that better than destroying his property, in this case his items. On top of that people would rather get all the loot he was holding than boast about incapacitating a player.

Besides that “fix” doesn’t really fix the issue. I wouldn’t really be more satisfied being incapacitated in five seconds than I would be at being killed in five seconds. When would I be satisfied then? By the time people can make strategic decisions both on the battlefield commander level and on the individual level, that’s when I’m satisfied.

Let’s go back to the focus firing and what makes it possible. To be able to focus fire on something, the opponent needs to be in range of all the combatants that are involved. The squad formation that this results in is commonly known as the blob. I’m not talking about the blob that comes up on the map where you have 200+ Faction Mobs crammed in the same region, I’m talking about the blob where those 200 Faction Mobs are crammed in to the same 15m radius chunk. If a player is range of one of them it’s in range of all of them, ie. around the tight “formation” of players is a “sphere of death” wherein anything hostile dies.

So what are we trying to do? Well some of you may have noticed that there are special equipment being seeded into the game, known as Polaris and Sirius. The names of these items are now considered to be incorrect. But regardless we are adding different attributes to different items.

The Polarian Empire

In the storyline the Polarians (who come from Polaris) are a race of people (using the Enderman as a template) who triumphed in a war against the Enders (who come from The End) and thus set up the SafeZone. Unofficially the SafeZone is actually the faction of Polaris but we will be changing this soon when we add new empires.

Polaris Weapons and Equipment

Polaris has four grades of technology. The first set is called “Omnipotent” and only 10 of each of this technology is available in the game from when we seed it. The Polaris weapons which already exist (Type I) actually have the same attributes.

Omnipotent – Maximum Enchantment Level (Unnatural)

The term ‘unnatural’ is used when regular in-game players are unable to achieve this.

Transcendent – Enchantment Level 700

All transcendent weapons and equipment are enchanted to the level of 700 (25 of each of these are available)

Polaris – Enchantment Level 400

All Polaris weapons and equipment are enchanted to the level of 400 (50 of each of these are available)

Sirius – Maximum Enchantment Level (Natural)

All Sirius weapons and equipment are enchanted to the maximum natural level (100 of each of these are available)

We have plans to seed more of these special weapons for different empires with different attributes and scarcity as our storyline grows and becomes available eventually.